10 February 2014

Not the Bread Knife!

09 February 2014

Foothills of Mount Roofmore

03 June 2013

Ten Years Ago

Ten years ago, our son was three-just-turning-four, and we needed to replace our ten-year-old car.

My husband was in a bit of a hurry to replace the car, as he was getting ready to leave for two weeks of annual training. He was hoping to pick out the new one before he left. He had this idea that he'd buy it, but not take it home until he got back.

He brought me with him, because I'm a lot more resistant to sales tactics than he is. And we brought our son to reinforce the "just looking" vibe.

The salesman ran through the litany of every high-pressure sales tactic in the book, from "I'll go talk to my manager" (leaving us sitting in a tiny office with an active, bored older toddler) to "Someone else is looking at that gray one, so if you don't sign today, it probably won't be there when you come back." And I could see my husband getting ready to sign on the dotted line.

And then the salesman said they had to have the license plate off the car my husband was planning to drive to annual training. Actually, he said he HAD to have it, and again made the pressuring threat about the new car not being there.

Anyone who knows me would have known this would not work. Being pushed does not make me cave in, it just awakens a veritable Vesuvius of stubborn.

I was already getting ticked off over the hours of trying to keep our son from running wild all over the showroom, and being told what I HAD TO do was that one step too far.

I blew up, told them where they could stick their car, and walked off with the kid. I even started to drive off without my husband, but the kid cried and made me stop.

With all that in mind:

Today someone made a comment on Ravelry about going to a car dealership with their mister. Someone else asked why they took a spray bottle to test-drive cars. And suddenly I had this wonderful idea:

If I had thought to bring a spray bottle when we went to go car shopping, every time the salesman tried another tactic, SQUIRT!

11 October 2012

It's National Coming Out day.

I basically came out as weird the moment I left the birth canal. I was a weird child and I'm a weird adult. I was told at my wedding by a relative that I was not just weird but "SO WEIRD".

The weird child faces teasing and bullying by other children and by children in grown-up bodies. There are no campaigns or ribbons for weirdness. The weird adult faces obstacles in finding friends, dates, and jobs.

These days many of the weird are diagnosed with something, but when I was growing up, I was just weird and had to figure out how to cope with a world that couldn't figure me out. I was chased and teased and beaten up in hallways. Sometimes I think it was a minor miracle I survived.

But I did. And I'd like to thank my husband and my many friends who accept my weirdness, and the colonies of fellow weird people I've found via the internet.

YOUR VOICE ON A SERIOUS MATTER IS NEEDED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. As you may know, MSU and the Cyclotron have been awarded a contract by US/DOE to built the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB). Within the least few days we have learned some of the details. To make room for the large industrial/warehouse style buildings that are needed for FRIB, the beautiful Bogue Street boulevard that runs north-south in front of the Wharton Center for Performing Arts will be bulldozed and the venerable oak trees (~150 years old) that grace it will be felled. These trees have stood there since the very beginning of the campus. Ironically, Bogue Street is named for the first Chair of the Department of Forestry at MSU when the department was created in 1902. Its destruction would be a slap in the face for MSU Forestry! Plans also in the works show that the attractive traffic circle at Shaw and Bogue Streets will be eliminated, along with the ancient oak and walnut trees that occupy it. In its place will be more asphalt. Apparently no creative thought given to how the natural beauty of this area of campus could be preserved while still allowing the necessary construction.

In the last few days a group has been formed of concerned faculty and staff to head off this travesty. The current plans could be altered to save the trees and maybe even Bogue Street. YOU CAN HELP! The concerns of alumni must be heard. Please write an email message to Jeff Kacos, Head of Campus Planning & Administration (kacos@cpa.msu.edu) and Konrad Gelbke, Director of the Cyclotron (gelbke@nscl.msu.edu) and express your opposition to the destruction of the trees.

MSU is renowned for the beauty of its campus. It's also renowned for its scientific work. But the two NEED NOT BE AT ODDS! This could be a win-win situation if the FRIB plans were altered to save the trees. Please help us out.

MSU graduates, knitters, and Twitter-friends, help me get the word out!

01 May 2012

annoyed

First it was a big loss, and then a more minor loss, and now it's riffing on annoying little changes.

The more minor loss was my part-time job. I kept quiet about that because I was embarrassed. But this year has become annoying enough that I don't feel like keeping quiet about it any more.

For over three years I had this great little part-time job cleaning a couple of local banks in the evenings. It was a great job for an introvert, all by myself (usually) in the empty building, with a set amount of time to do a set list of tasks. It was physically demanding, a three-hour workout twice a week that I got paid for.

And then, I got fired. For the stupidest reason on the planet:

Every so often, about a four-pack worth of the cheesy institutional toilet paper would disappear out of the case in the furnace room at one of my locations. It was annoying - I knew someone at the bank was taking it, but I had no way to lock it up.

I tried keeping a running tally on the side of the box, hoping the thief would get the clue that I knew how much they used per week, and would lay off and shell out for their own toilet paper. But no.

Then I tried another tactic: I wrote "Honesty is the best policy," which I thought was a pretty innocuous statement to make in a bank, on a piece of paper, and left that in the toilet paper box.

And I got fired. First I got a call from my manager, asking if I "left them a note", and I explained. I was reprimanded.

A couple weeks later, the manager asked to meet me, and told me I was fired. Someone at the bank had called the cleaning service and said I had left them a "nasty note".

So yeah: I was fired for trying to get someone else to quit stealing. Go me!

09 March 2012

Wilhelmine

A Little Knitting Mystery

I've probably mentioned before that one of my favorite knitting books is Mary Thomas's Book of Knitting Patterns. Between that and Mary Thomas's Knitting Book, there are very few aspects of the knitting universe left uncovered. A technique might be called by an obscure name, but it's probably in there, however briefly. This pair of books has history, lace, garment design - even how to graft ribbing.

They are full of little historical snippets that make me want to know more: what happened to Mrs. Hermann Tragy's knitting collection? (WWII, I'm afraid.)

Does the amazing piece of knitted lace shown in the Pattern Book on page 190, Fig. 194, still exist?

But today's little mystery is this: on page 241 of her Pattern book, Fig. 235 (on the left in the photo), Mary Thomas has what the caption calls "Knitted Doyley. Modern Danish."

I've always liked this little doily, and guess what was in one of the recent Niebling reprints, Schöne Spitzen?

That would be the charted pattern on the right, Wilhelmine.

Now I know a lot of stuff is getting tagged "Herbert Niebling" that probably isn't. Knitters these days have a lot more name recognition than they ever did in the past, so putting Herbert Niebling in as the designer is more likely to sell patterns than admitting that the designer's name is lost.

But Mary Thomas labels this as "modern". To me that means it was published in her lifetime, and her book was printed in 1938. I have a hard time believing she would have mixed Denmark up with any part of Germany, especially since seven pages later she calls another doily Bavarian.